Lady Oldebellum

I strained a tendon in my foot last night making fun of a song by the band Lady Antebellum.

This is what I’ve come to, people. Watch me as I epitomize the indignity of aging with an interpretive dance.

I couldn’t help it. I’ve heard about them on Facebook, this band, but I’ve never heard them. The kids, they like the Lady Antebellum. I was expecting to at least appreciate their musical talent even if they weren’t my style. Like Lady Gaga, the other popular Lady.

(I don’t really groove on Lady Gaga’s music, but the woman can rock on the piano and has a great voice. I can’t deny it. In a culture full of prefab starlets pimped by Disney and Nickelodeon to be harmless malleable anorexic ditzes who dress like baby whores, a.k.a. an average young woman on Halloween, I can always appreciate a strong chick who writes her own songs and actually plays an instrument.)

My husband and I were on the couch, beers in hands, watching a recorded episode of Saturday Night Live. When you have a kid, you don’t ever get to watch your favorite shows when they are actually on, and I bow down to the gods and goddesses of digital recording capabilities with a sacrifice of remote control-sized batteries every week in appreciation. So the episode we were watching was from early October, and Lady Antebellum was the musical guest.

When the mandolin and sprightly beat started, I began to laugh hysterically. Like, tears rolling down my face, clutching a pillow to my stomach while my husband looked at me with equal parts amusement and unease. I only had one beer in me, I swear. That’s all I ever drink anymore. If I’m being “crazy” and “reckless,” I have two.

(And if you are laughing at me right now, YOU try to get up at the crack of sparrow fart every day with a hangover to deal with my son whose personality most closely resembles that of a coke addict drinking coffee while eating spoonsful of sugar straight from the bag.)

(But seriously… could you do that? Please? I’m so tired.)

I couldn’t stop laughing. He finally asked, “Why are you laughing like this?”

“It’s just so, so… jaunty. And ridiculous. I thought they were going to be a hipster band, and they’re making me want to dance merrily in a field of flowers! At Ren-fest! And the guy with the braids! He looks like he’s been possessed by a Catholic school girl! Oh my God, it’s so awful it’s actually AWESOME.”

He rolled his eyes at me, which kind of pissed me off, but I was still giggling.

I said, “This song is making me picture women with flowers braided into their hair dancing a jig in a meadow! Like this!”

And then I stood up and danced an insane jig around the living room for my poor, long-suffering husband, who was now laughing at how dumb I looked while I laughed at how dumb the band sounded. I made him even more uncomfortable with the dancing than the laughing had made him: I could tell by the frightened look in his eyes while he laughed at me. I’m known in friend circles for my creepy interpretive dances. They’re haunting.

(The secret to a creepy interpretive dance is to make an insane, blank-eyed face while you do smarmy, mildly off-putting hippie things with your body to the beat of the song. Now you know. I have friends who still hate my creepy interpretive dances to this day, people I no longer even hang out with on a regular basis.)

The lead singer even played air guitar. YES. It was so gloriously terrible. I loved it while I was loathing it.

After I calmed down, he tried to tell to me why they are popular, comparing them to the cheesy eighties music of our youth and explaining that this band is today’s version of that stuff. Which I understand. But still.

So I sat down and finished my beer. And then I realized that my tendon was aching. And then I berated myself in my head, Was it worth it to be snarky and mean and mock a band by dancing to their music in an embarrassing manner? Was it worth it?

Because I do that. I often berate myself for the things I say and do. I replay conversations I’ve had with people over the week and feel stupid as I think about how maybe I could have said that better, and maybe they took that the wrong way and are mad at me, and that maybe I should just not talk ever. I share odd details of my life with my people and think, Why the hell would they care? Why do I ever share things like that?